Hollywood has never been particularly inclined to hitch its escapist impulses to slavery, America’s original sin. Yet here we are, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and two movies with 17 Oscar nominations between them are eyeing the Peculiar Institution.

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, both nominees for best picture, could scarcely take different approaches to the subject. One is a blood-drenched revenge fantasy that checks anything resembling political correctness at the door. The other is a savvy study in political horse-trading built around a richly mythologized American leader.

Look closer, however, and you’ll see that both movies come at slavery from oblique angles. They’re less interested in slavery as a subject than in how the phenomenon can further the filmmakers’ specific moviemaking purposes and please contemporary audiences.

At this point, it’s not as if we should expect different, especially from Tarantino. Once you’ve used the Holocaust as a vehicle for revenge fantasy (Inglourious Basterds), slavery seems a logicalnext step. Django Unchained is largely a depository for Tarantino’s ideas about B-grade genre movies, from the spaghetti Western (including 1966’s Django) to blaxploitation (the see-it-to-believe-it 1975 hot mess that is Mandingo).

For those wondering: Historians confirm that Mandingo fighting, the brawl-to-the-death slavery matches featured in Mandingo and Django Unchained, did not exist. Slaves were too valuable an investment to risk losing in such a cavalier manner.

That’s the thing about Tarantino: His movies are more about movies than anything else, much less anything important. But even as Django Unchained threatens to trivialize slavery with its pyrotechnic splatter and grindhouse homages, it also illustrates slavery’s violence upon the human body as few, if any, movies ever have (with the possible exception of Jonathan Demme and Oprah Winfrey’s awkward 1998 adaptation of Beloved).

The carnage starts in the film’s first sequence, when we see the deep gash left in Django’s ankle by an iron shackle, and proceeds to grislier sights, including a captured runaway torn apart by dogs. Violence has been the key element of Tarantino’s cinematic vocabulary, but it’s never cut quite so close to the American bone. The slaver class may be the ultimate straw man, but let’s face it: There’s a sickening glee in watching it burn. It makes sense that Tarantino would make this movie: He likes nothing better than pushing hot buttons.

Spielberg, of course, is a cooler customer. Not for him the geysers of blood and fire-breathing vengeance of Django Unchained. In Lincoln, slavery — or, rather, abolition — is the issue behind a story of political calculus and the rectitude of a towering figure. It’s the moral basis of the movie’s ingeniously plotted backroom dealing and political horse-trading.

The end of slavery wasn’t always Lincoln’s endgame, as Tommy Lee Jones’ radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and his allies make clear in the movie. But it was the driving force behind his gamble to push the 13th Amendment through before the end of the Civil War.

As for slavery itself, it lingers on the film’s periphery, out of sight if not out of mind or high-minded debate. Lincoln comes closest to actually showing slavery when young Tad Lincoln (Gulliver McGrath) obsessively pores over glass plate negatives showing slavery’s ravages upon human flesh, including a famous shot of a stoic man’s heavily scarred back.

University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Barbara Krauthamer writes eloquently about the movie’s soft-shoe around slavery in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The film’s depiction of emancipation largely excludes African-American women and men as anything other than the patient and grateful recipients of the gift of freedom. This is, of course, Spielberg’s prerogative as a filmmaker … It is the film’s inability to come to terms with slavery’s grotesque and relentless violence, especially sexual violence against black women, that is most objectionable.”

Krauthamer is right: It is Spielberg’s prerogative as a filmmaker, and he’s made a great film. But it also raises questions: to what extent is Lincoln obligated to show slavery’s consequences on actual slaves? When might we see a movie about slavery told from the perspective of, or at least highlighting the stories of, Frederick Douglass? Nat Turner? Sojourner Truth? It’s an understatement to suggest such a project would have a hard time finding funding or proper marketing. For all of its alleged liberal bias, Hollywood remains the epitome of a mainstream industry.

It seems art films will have to pick up the slack for now. Later this year we’ll see Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped in Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery in the deep South. McQueen (Shame, Hunger) isn’t known for pulling punches, and there’s no reason to think he’ll start here. Which means we might just be in for a slavery movie that’s actually about slavery.

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About Chris Vognar

Chris has written about film, music, theater and books for The News since 1996. He attended Harvard for a year as the 2009 Arts and Culture Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UC Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in English literature. He is has taught arts journalism at SMU and film history at the University of Texas at Arlington. Chris has covered the Toronto Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Academy Awards. Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisvognar.

Education/career track: Studied literature and film at Berkeley. Sold futons for six years. Arrived at the Dallas Morning News in 1996.

I'd rather be: In school. I went to Harvard for a Nieman Fellowship from 2008-2009, and I teach arts journalism at SMU.

When I'm not watching movies I'm watching: The NBA. Go Mavs.

Why I write about movies: Because I love them. Well, the good ones anyway.

Favorite movie: Depends on the day you ask. But you can never go wrong with Chinatown.

Hometown: Berkeley, CA

Education: Chris received his B.A. in English literature from UC Berkeley.